Jason

I often use the phrase “didn't blow my socks off” to describe books that are good, but not outstandingly good, and this aptly describes The Bormann Testament. Did I enjoy reading it? Yes. Is it going to be a book of the year for me? Nope, but that's fine. If I hadn't liked it, I would have DNF'd it and moved on.

The idea of Martin Bormann - Hitler's private secretary and right-hand man - surviving the war and trying to sell a tell-all memoir is interesting, but also an anachronism in retrospect. In reality, Bormann died just after Hitler painted a wall with his brains and before Berlin fell to the Soviets, but at the time this novel came out, it was unclear whether he was alive or dead. His remains wouldn't be found until 1975 and definitely identified via DNA testing in 1998. Of course, if it was known that he was dead, then this novel wouldn't exist.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about the main character, Paul Chavasse. He was not in any sense a James Bond clone. In fact, he would probably only qualify as one of those 00 agents that were sometimes mentioned as being killed in the movies. He was often caught flatfooted and found himself being rescued by one of the other characters in the novel. It's not really a surprise, then, that Jack Higgins only wrote six books starring Chavasse (the last being in 1969) and moved on to other characters.

Having said that, I might continue the series, provided I can get my hands on the next book in the series.

3.5 stars.

Minor spoilers ahead:

A book that started out strong, stumbled a bit, and ended okay. Not a bad book - indeed, it was quite enjoyable - it just hits a point where certain characters get on your nerves and it the story feels overly long, as if Michael Crichton was padding the story to meet the word count.

It was interesting to compare the book with the Steven Spielberg flick. There were differences, obviously, but it was fun to see what scenes made it into the movie. I like that in the book, John Hammond is far from being the nice, likeable character that the late great Richard Attenborough portrayed. In the novel, he's just an absolute b*stard and so blatantly out of touch with reality and the consequences of his actions (like funding the creation of dinosaurs and populating an entire island with them), that you'll almost gleefully enjoy his demise.

On the flipside, however, Crichton very obviously did not know how to write little girls. I say this because by three quarters of the way into the novel, you'll want to throw Lexi to the velociraptors yourself! In the movie, she's a fine, likeable character. In the book, she's almost a non-entity for most of the book whereupon she suddenly and inexplicably turns into an absolute brat. Seriously, there's a scene where she refuses to give her older brother (their ages are flipped around in the movie) a radio because "I found it first" and that trumps him needing to call for help. At that point, I started wishing that she'd either go back to plaintively complaining about being hungry, or that one of those aforementioned velociraptors would show up and eat her. Sounds terrible, but holy cow, she's bad.

All in all, I would still recommend this to anybody who wants to read a techno-thriller based on science run amok.